I was born in England and moved to Australia during my high school years. I chose to go straight to university from school and study science, simply because that was the subject I was best at throughout my schooling. After 4 1/2 years fulltime I got some letters after my name, and I landed a great job at a company called Gradipore as a Product Development Scientist. I remained there until a few days before the birth of my first child. Unfortunately it wasn't practical for me to return there after my maternity leave had finished. Instead I went to work for Island Internet Services (now known as Genisyst) as the job on offer was able to be a lot more flexible and fit in with my random life, that was 11 years ago now.....wow that makes me feel old! At Genisyst I work in the financial/managerial side of the company, but over the years I have had access to some brilliant IT minds and I have learnt a few things that readers might find helpful.

Recently, I've been trying to assist my eldest child (11 years old) with studying for upcoming exams. Even though I had put forward a monetary reward for good results achieved, boy was there still a large amount of whinging that went on. One of the subjects was music theory, and when reading about it in books or watching a teacher scribble about it on a board, I grant you it is really quite hard to wrap your head around the various concepts. You really need to hear and play these ideas out on a keyboard, for example to explain a major chord (a chord having a root, a major third, and a perfect fifth) is all great but it means nothing to a child, but if they can see the notes highlighted on a keyboard so that they can see the pattern and count the number of tones between notes played...